Dip your mobile into the fast-flowing river of news

Dave Winer's "river of news" finally looks like catching on - at least on mobile phones and other portable devices. In fact, it was Winer getting a BlackBerry that kicked off the latest round of enthusiasm. On his blog, Winer noted that he "reached nirvana" on the San Francisco light railway.

"I was able to read a few stories from the Sunday New York Times," he reported, "and I knew this was it, this is going to be huge, these devices work for reading news. Now the question is how to promote it so that all the people who can benefit from it hear about it." (http://tinyurl.com/kyvv8)

Winer was using some RSS news feeds that he set up himself, at nytimesriver .com, which he accepts the New York Times could stop, but hopes they won't. Winer also set up bbcriver.com using BBC feeds, plus some rivers for particular blogs.

As the name suggests, it's a simple idea. Each news item arrives in plain text and consists of a date and time, a headline, and usually one sentence, such as: "Hitler's desk 'may sell for $1m'. A desk and chair from Adolf Hitler's private apartment in Munich is expected to be sold for $1m."

New items arrive when they are posted, and old ones are automatically deleted to make room. You can dip into the river whenever you like, and click on any headline to get the full story from the original site (see newsriver.org/about).

This is roughly what journalists and "copy tasters" have been doing since Reuters and other "wire services" started. Now hundreds of millions of people with mobile phones can do it too.

Of course, there are many other ways to read news on the road, with AvantGo being a popular example. Many other people have also been working with RSS news feeds, such as feedcombine.co.uk and feedblendr.com and the FreeNews aggregator from freerangeinc.com. So naturally lots of people got annoyed about this Winer guy "reinventing the wheel".

As Winer commented on his blog: "Predictable backlash from people who say that reading news on a BlackBerry is nothing new, they've been doing it for years. I'm sure they have, and people were listening to MP3s on Macs and PCs before podcasting, but that doesn't mean it wasn't a turning point for audio on the internet."

Winer also pointed out that, as a pioneer of RSS, he'd been doing "river of news" aggregators since 1999, and ease of use made a difference. "NYTimesRiver is good because it requires no setup, one size fits all, and it delivers consistent value."

It's also an idea that publishers could welcome. Repurposing stuff to make it "mobile friendly" often involves work. Sometimes people do it badly, or do it late, or forget to do it, and readers get annoyed. River of news is different, because it's an RSS hack. Many publications and most blogs already generate RSS feeds without any human intervention. Once you've set up a river of news, there's nothing more to do.

Not everyone wants to read a river of news. Many people prefer someone (or some thing) to decide which stories are important and display them in a hierarchical format. Perhaps they only want the top 10 stories, and often those don't change much throughout the day. That's fine. Plenty of services do that. River of news is another option, not compulsory.

Many people would perhaps like a river of news but only for one or two narrow topics: they want football news but not rugby and other sports, or whatever. There are thousands of mini- and micromarkets waiting to be served.

That process has already started. To mention just one example, Ewan MacLeod and Adrian McEwen have set up News Dribbles, which uses BBC feeds to provide "river of news" feeds for Premiership football clubs. Each address uses the club's initials plus FC, such as mufc.newsrivers.com (Manchester United FC) and WAfcriver.com (Wigan Athletic FC). There's a list at http://newsrivers.com/?p=4.

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